The monument is therefore a ripple in space, a signaling that acts there on an aptitude for symbolization and, at the same time, is a stimulus for the production of symbolic awareness. It’s the point in which one can look one’s own time in the eye, one can be contemporary with one’s own era and support a project for the future. For this reason the monument, even when it commemorates a past event, is always a monument to the possible. Otherwise it is once again an empty symbol, once again a catastrophe.
Lecture by Matteo Cavalleri, “A monument to the possible”, Research week, 30.10.2010
Monuments today can, perhaps must, be born in this folds, they must be thought of and work as folds themselves, they must alter the desert of symbolization, they must propose themselves as metareflexive moments in which the subject rediscovers itself as human. Activating, modifying, broadening ways of moving in space, that is metaphorically in the world. They must be connected, contribute to an awareness and to a symbolic universe right in the moment of their maximum crisis, helping to identify the dynamics of the desire which connect them. Monuments should be able to bear witness to a desire which is, in primis, of acknowledgment and of thought.
Lecture by Matteo Cavalleri, “A monument to the possible”, Research week, 30.10.2010
A monument […] should represent, embody this idea almost as if it were something which isn’t completely there, or which in a certain sense is not there yet. Not because it must have its own strength and clarity, or can’t have foundations in that which precedes the present: but because, at any rate, it requires a tension still needing to be crossed, needing to be accomplished or reached. Even if it is about origin which should be an origin which is discovered in the new actions related to it.
Lecture by Matteo Cavalleri, “A monument to the possible”, Research week, 30.10.2010
The monument, as with the symbol, implies and communicates to the present a memory for the future. It can refer to a genesis, to a foundation, to a capability or a project regarding the collective, it can very well have a relationship – even precise or deep – with the history or with an origin of this. But this history or this origin, in order not to be hypostatized and become empty symbols, must, in an authentic monument, have the renewed character of a destination to reach: they must be able to be thought of as a project, a tension able to solicit a new crossing, a pathway. The destination is the origin, Karl Kraus would comment.
Lecture by Matteo Cavalleri, “A monument to the possible”, Research week, 30.10.2010
I would like to propose an image – Tommaso Laureti’s The triumph of Christianity – as both an introduction and a background for what I will say, an image that has exerted something of a hypnotic pull recently, as it seems to encapsulate so many of the questions I have been asking myself, it seems to function as my own private retro futurism. At a superficial level, placing such an image in the context of a discussion about monuments suggests the fundamentally disjunctive nature of the monument, with it – I would argue that the monument is always double […]. The doubleness is also a function of success and failure – Hirschhorn, monument and countermonument – either actualized or haunting the monument as a spectral alternative to it, ideological majorities and minorities, history and its falsification. A monument always has a duck-rabbit directionality, it is always a cut across the memosphere. […] The third monument, neither for something nor against something, is the complicated monument, where symmetry is powerless, where symmetry/ order do not coincide with clarification, and where a definition of communality does not precede and inform the actual monumental work.
MIhnea Mircan, Monument to concomittance, 26.10.2010
I would say that Communism’s possession of monumental territory was grounded in an act of destruction, removing the traces of the bourgeoisie and abruptly halting the production of public space they testified to. The symmetrical reverse of this process in 1989 and throughout the messy decade that followed articulates a complete history of violence, a recurring scenario of conflict between monuments, ideological majorities and minorities – voices that diminish the monument’s forward stride, a systematic ‘return of the evacuated’ that erodes grandeur and projections of totality, violently inscribing multiplicity into the logic of the monument.
MIhnea Mircan, Monument to concomittance, 26.10.2010
The idea that a “debt” should be “paid” via the monument sets the work, before its realization, in continuity with the symbolic ravage that monuments have performed throughout history.
MIhnea Mircan, Monument to concomittance, 26.10.2010
The "monument" has less to do with bronze or stone than with the victories, gaps or losses that deserve, today, monumental sites of public negotiation. The need of the monument is understood as a manifestation of our ideological unrest.
As big as, how big should the monument be, the answer is a 1:1 relationship and its subject, an ironic scaling where the monument overlaps perfectly with the statement it puts forward. There might be an interesting understanding of the performative in both cases, performative in the linguistic sense.
By declaring that this particular stone is the last stone of Belgium, by burying monumentality, any subsequent monument, glorifying whatever fragment of the history or self-perception of Belgium, needs to respond to Luc Deleu’s claim to have ended a genre, to the urgency with which the work asks for other forms of addressing social or historiographic troubles than conventional monumentality. The Stone purports to terminate the cycle of commemoration, in a way that contradicts subsequent monuments, attaching itself parasitically to them and denying their right to exist.
MIhnea Mircan, Monument to concomittance, 26.10.2010
The project materializes In the residents’ prolonged efforts to persuade the local authorities to change the name of the street, and all entries corresponding to it in all archival, bureaucratic systems of the municipality. It is a long-term, intensely frustrating process, that demands countless readjustments of bureaucratic personae. Everything, all the thousands of details, need to be slightly shifted around the task of commemoration, which is not consigned, and externalised, in an object. Nothing is more invisible than a monument, as Musil said, but in this case, nothing is more intricate, awkward, painful and delayed. The responsibility of commemoration is instead taken over by the social body, rehearsed daily, together with other forms of ‘identity’.
MIhnea Mircan, Monument to concomittance, 26.10.2010
The traditional monument’s relationship to death is one of elision: death is annulled, triumphed over in the name of the ideology. The story told by the monument is always one of ideological martyrdom: in the monument, death belongs to the victor. Sluipweg reads as a way of internalizing the relationship between monument and death, of conflating elements on whose distinction the success of the genre relies. The operation here seems to be one of memorial equivalence, whereby death is simultaneous with the monument, and the memorial ‘comes alive’, in the grip of a Pygmalion complex.
MIhnea Mircan, Monument to concomittance, 26.10.2010